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Comparing Anthos to other Google Cloud Services
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Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
54m
Students
366
Ratings
4.7/5
Description

Anthos is an enterprise-grade solution from Google aimed at nothing less than modernizing and unifying your entire server infrastructure, wherever it currently exists. Anthos encompasses a very broad spectrum of components, yet it’s still very new, so there isn’t a lot of good documentation and training material available for it yet. This can all make Anthos seem very daunting to learn, but this course aims to show you that the very purpose of Anthos is to simplify your infrastructure complexities for you.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand what Anthos is and does
  • Identify how Anthos fits in with other existing hybrid and multi-cloud solutions
  • Investigate options to modernize existing infrastructure configurations to use Anthos
  • Learn about the key components that make up Anthos, and how to configure them
  • Build and test a modern microservice application for Anthos on GCP
  • Create a CI/CD pipeline for deploying to Anthos

Intended Audience

  • Developers interested in learning about the latest in modern cloud-based development strategies

Prerequisites

  • Familiarity with Kubernetes and GKE
  • Have a Google Cloud Platform account
  • Have the Google Cloud SDK installed and initialized
  • Have Git installed

It is also highly recommended that you have Docker Desktop and Visual Studio Code pre-installed as well.

Transcript

Comparing Anthos to other Google Cloud services. For anyone who has any existing experience with other Google Cloud Platform services, Anthos will already feel somewhat familiar to you. Many tools you may have already been using on GCP, like Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Build, and Operations Suite all function the same way within Anthos, and the user interface to manage Anthos looks quite like the Google Cloud Console you're used to working with. While Anthos is built to be a multi-cloud solution that can run in other environments, users who are already familiar with Google Cloud Platform will naturally find it easiest to adopt Anthos because much of that experience translates over directly.

Deploying Anthos on Google Cloud Platform is also made incredibly easy to do. Google offers a wide array of cloud services that exist outside of Anthos that we might want to leverage with our Anthos deployment, like perhaps a CloudSQL database, some CDN file storage, or maybe we have some special purpose Google Compute Engine virtual machine instance, for example. We're able to provision any other Google Cloud Platform resources we need with Anthos using the help of Config Connector. Config Connector allows us to write Kubernetes style configuration files for GCP resources, which we can then deploy and manage using Anthos GKE. This is all done securely with the help of Google Identity and Access Management, offering basically a seamless integration between Anthos and the rest of Google Cloud Platform.

While users already operating on Google Cloud Platform may have the easiest time moving to Anthos, they also may have the least reason to immediately do so. Remember that moving to Anthos is more about modernization than migration, and GCP and Anthos are made of many of the same technologies. If your infrastructure consists of mainly Google Compute Engine VMs, there would most certainly be benefits to modernizing to containers with GKE or Anthos. If you are already managing containers using Google Kubernetes Engine, or you already employ a microservices architecture using Google Cloud Functions or Google Cloud Run, there may be no pressing need for you to move to Anthos at all. You could, however, very easily move your existing services to Anthos with only minimal code changes, if perhaps you decided you needed to migrate or expand to additional service providers.

We should now have a better understanding that Anthos essentially packages a number of Google Cloud Platform services together, so we can run them on our own servers or on other providers. In the next lecture, we'll take a closer look at some of those other cloud service providers, discuss how we can run Anthos on them, and compare Anthos to their own cloud products.

About the Author

Arthur spent seven years managing the IT infrastructure for a large entertainment complex in Arizona where he oversaw all network and server equipment and updated many on-premise systems to cloud-based solutions with Google Cloud Platform. Arthur is also a PHP and Python developer who specializes in database and API integrations. He has written several WordPress plugins, created an SDK for the Infusionsoft API, and built a custom digital signage management system powered by Raspberry Pis. Most recently, Arthur has been building Discord bots and attempting to teach a Python AI program how to compose music.